Google Chrome to Use AI to Predict whether Users Want to Receive Notifications

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June 10, 2022

Google chrome to use ai for notifications

Google Chrome is working to tackle certain websites that consistently smother users by spamming them with website notifications. In the upcoming release of Chrome, Google will launch a machine learning model that ties into its far-reaching aim to use AI to achieve ambient computing and predict whether users wish to receive notifications.

This enhancement aims at making web browsing more incessant by cutting down and blocking disruptive messages. In the upcoming version, Chrome will automatically revoke the website’s permission.

Google insists that many users blankly “Allow” the notification prompt. Within minutes, the website starts pinging their browser periodically. If a user subscribes to a website that spams, the situation gets out of control.

The company has already successfully mutated the notification prompts that abuse or mislead. The quieter browsing experience will apply to notifications in general. People can still alter predictions and subscribe to the notifications if they so desire.

This development in Chrome is a more robust approach to combat spam. As a Google spokesperson said, “Notification spam is one of the top complaint reports we receive from Chrome users. This feature addresses this problem by ensuring users are only receiving relevant notifications.”

Using ML, Google wants to conform to a person’s usage in more particular ways and try to act on behalf of the user to cater to the needs and interests. ML in Chrome will also enable webpages to appear more frequently in a user’s selected language. The company plans to intervene in such browsing experiences under users’ discretion.

Shield AI Raises $165 million in Series E Funding Round

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 10, 2022

Defense-related artificial intelligence-powered products developing company Shield AI raises $165 million in its recently held series E funding round.

This newly raised capital has increased the company’s market valuation to over $2.3 billion, making it join SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril as the only multi-billion-dollar defense-tech startups of the past 20 years.

As part of a Series E funding round, the company raised $90 million in equity and $75 million in debt. Shield AI’s latest funding round was led by Snowpoint Ventures’ Doug Philippone, and received participation from several other investors, including Riot Ventures, Disruptive, Homebrew, and others.

“Investors are flocking to quality. This round is a reflection of Shield AI’s success in creating great products, building a business with strong fundamentals, and dominant technological leadership – with an AI pilot proven to be the world’s best in numerous military evaluations,” said co-founder of Snowpoint Ventures, Doug Philippone, regarding the latest funding round.

Doug further added that they like employing an AI and software backbone across several aircraft to provide genuinely game-changing value to their warfighters.

San Diego-based artificial intelligence company Shield AI was founded by Andrew Reiter, Brandon Tseng, and Ryan Tseng in 2015. The firm specializes in developing solutions and products that cater to national security needs. To date, Shield AI has raised more than $513 million from investors like Breyer Capital, Point72 Ventures, SVB Capital, Disruptive, and many others over ten funding rounds.

Co-founder and CEO of Shield AI, Ryan Tseng, said, “Advancements in technology, medicine, education, and the overall human condition are made when security and stability are strong.”

He also mentioned this requires that the United States and its allies, as forces for good, have the strongest capabilities available to them, including AI pilots that protect people and dissuade violence.

Recently, Shield AI also announced that it would develop swarming drones and autonomous robocrafts for the United States air force. Shield AI’s unnamed robocrafts will help the US air force gain a strategic advantage over its enemies and make better data-driven decisions.

Google Developers Calculate 100 Trillion Digits of Pi Setting a New Record

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Disha Chopra

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June 10, 2022

google records 100 trillion digits of pi

Google has banked a new record as it calculates 100 trillion digits of Pi. It is not the first time that Google Cloud’s developer Emma Haruka Iwao and her team members set a world record to calculate the most digits of Pi. Three years ago in 2019, they set a record by computing Pi digits up to the 31.4-trillionth decimal place.

For millennia, mathematicians calculated the value of Pi, dating back to Babylonians. It is used in various computations on time-based cycles and space-based circles. Computing Pi’s value is not just about calculations. Such successful calculations demonstrate how algorithms can handle practical problems and keep running for a long time without errors. It’s also a demonstration of the reliability of the infrastructure.

Since the previous record in 2019, engineering and computer science infrastructure has progressed many folds, which is why the previous Google Cloud record calculating Pi digits was beaten less than a year later and broken again in 2021.

One may not need to calculate Pi’s digits up to the 100-trillionth decimal place, but the massive calculation exhibits how flexible Google Cloud’s infrastructure has become over the years. Iwao and the Google team have achieved 100 trillion digits because of improvements in Google Cloud’s Compute Engine and its throughput.

Iwao and her team kept the program ‘y-cruncher’ running for more than five months (approximately 157 days) to get the result. Y-cruncher is one of the first few programs that programmers have been using for computing Pi digits. It has been designed explicitly for tens of billions of digits. But for Iwao, it is not just about the digits or numbers. “I’m looking forward to more advancements and shifts in computer science and engineering, as well as in algorithms and mathematics,” Iwao said.

These advancements are not only specific to computing Pi digits. Down-to-earth computing tasks can efficiently use such developments, and so can Pi-in-the-sky problems.

Anagenex Rounds $30M in Series A for its Alpha-Go type AI

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Disha Chopra

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June 10, 2022

The Boston-based startup rounds $30M in funding as it promises to bring AI-based small-molecule drug discovery to the world. Anagenex has the ultimate goal of developing life-saving drugs for previously undruggable targets. It combines large-scale lab experiments and an AI-based iterative process that follows an approach similar to what DeepMind used to train Alpha-Go.

The company hooked the investment in a Series A funding round led by Catalio Capital Management, with a previous seed round of $7.2M. In a release, George Petrocheilos, a general partner at Catalio, said, “We see a lot of platform technologies, but were blown away by Anagenex’s potential to fundamentally reshape how small molecules drugs are discovered.”

Drug discovery necessitates infinite patience and budget. Anagenex claims it can do AI-based iterations cost-efficiently and rapidly synthesize millions of compounds in its specially designed biochemistry lab. The lab has been made from the ground up to test the compounds 10x faster and cheaper than other competitors in the industry. Their lab has the facilities for testing more than two billion drug-like prototypes.

Nicholas Tilmans, Anagenex’s CEO, explained that their AI is designed to answer questions like any other AI/ML, but the questions they cater to are much more complex. Anagenex has a better way of testing initially synthesized compounds. It then feeds the results into its AI engine to train it.

Besides synthesizing the drug prototypes, Anagenex incorporates technologies like DNA Encoded Libraries and Affinity Selected Mass Spectrometry to test them simultaneously. This is why Anagenex’s efficiency and power make it tolerable for the uncertainty of drug discovery.

AI to help study Images from James Webb Space Telescope

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Dipayan Mitra

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June 10, 2022

AI study images James Webb Space Telescope

Scientists to study the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope using GPUs powered by NVIDIA.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is set to reveal the first full-color photographs from the $10 billion research instrument next month.

Experts suggest that deep learning powered by GPUs will play a crucial part in numerous high-profile attempts to analyze data from the groundbreaking telescope located a million miles distant from Earth.

Some astronomers will use machine-learning techniques to discover and categorize galaxies in deep space at a hitherto unseen degree of precision.

According to NVIDIA, researchers can use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate Morpheus on various platforms, ranging from an NVIDIA DGX Station desktop AI system to a small computing cluster outfitted with several dozen NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs. The JWST will let scientists observe the universe in ways they have never seen before.

Brant Robertson, an astrophysics professor at the University of California, said, “The JWST data is exciting because it gives us an unprecedented window on the infrared universe, with a resolution that we’ve only dreamed about until now.”

He further added that they have now combined attention methods that allow for more sections of pictures to be categorized at once, resulting in a speedup of about a factor of a hundred. Robertson is part of a team of roughly 50 researchers that will map the universe’s earliest structure using the COSMOS-Webb project. It is the largest general observer program chosen for JWST’s first year.

“The COSMOS-Webb project is the largest contiguous area survey that will be executed with JWST for the foreseeable future,” added Robertson.

Polygon joins ‘Join Innovation Center’ for aviation industry advancement

By

Sahil Pawar

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June 10, 2022

Polygon, a decentralized Ethereum scaling platform, has joined hands with the Joint Innovation Centre (JIC) to introduce technological advancements to the aviation industry and enhance the passenger experience. The center is a joint venture of Bangalore’s Kempegowda International Airport, Amazon Web Service (AWS), and Intel India.

Previously known as Matic Network, Polygon is the first well-organized, user-friendly Ethereum scaling and infrastructure creation platform. Polygon SDK, the core component of the software, is a modular and flexible framework that supports the development of various types of applications.

Currently, Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) is working with Amazon Web Services to establish the Joint Innovation Center by the end of 2022. Now, with Polygon as a part of the initiative, the development of JIC is expected to pick up the pace.

The first initiative dedicated to advancing the aviation industry, the JIC will focus on incorporating digital innovations at airports, enhancing passenger experience, and creating a positive impact on the community.

The Joint Innovation Centre will help strengthen BIAL’s digital roadmap by developing custom solutions for Bengaluru airport using a combination of technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain concepts, cloud computing, analytics, machine learning (ML), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics are some of the technologies to be used.

AI for India backed by AWS and the Govt to teach Artificial Intelligence to 25 lakh Indian Students

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 10, 2022

The Data Tech Labs launches its new AI for India program to train and upskill over 25 lakh Indian students in artificial intelligence. AI for India is powered by AWS and backed by the Ministry of Education (GOI) and AICTE, with the goal of training, practicing, allocating projects, certifying, and employing Indian citizens.

Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan launched the program in the presence of more than a hundred MNCs, MSMEs and Startups in Delhi.

The AI for India campaign is a component of the GOI’s ABCDEFGHI program, which aims to impact and train students in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, BlockChain, Data analytics and intelligence, Full stack developer, Cyber Security, Extended Reality (XR), Electronics, Energy solutions, Gamification, GitHub, HTML5, Human-computer interaction, and IoT.

According to officials, the program is divided into the following five events –

National Future Engineering Scholarship Examination: Aimed for class 8th to 12th students, undergrad/postgrad students, and others looking to upskill on developing technologies.
All India Skill to Scale Avenue: This is open to all students who graduated during the pandemic years and have gaps in their skill sets compared to industry requirements.
AI Ideathon: This event encourages students and citizens to generate ideas for solving any human-centric national issue using AI, Data, Cloud, and associated sciences.
All India Data Engineering Quiz intends to diversify data knowledge across fields and verticals.
All India Jobathon for Cloud, Data, and AI Aspirants, in which participants will be allowed to apply for 100000 jobs from Indian enterprises.

CCO of AICTE, Chandrashekhar Budha, said, “AI for India Initiative is trying to bridge the gap between the supply and demand matrix in worldwide tech talent, with Indian students. We are changing our educational policies to skill and upskill students to make them future-ready.”

He further added that AI for India would provide digital education for employment and entrepreneurship to the 21st-century generation in the arts, commerce, science, architecture, engineering, and other fields.

WhatsApp initiative SMBSaathi Utsav helps small businesses go digital

By

Sahil Pawar

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June 10, 2022

WhatsApp India has recently launched an initiative, SMBSaathi Utsav, to support small local businesses by providing them with training to run their business on digital platforms such as Whatsapp Business App.

Currently running on a pilot basis in Jaipur’s Johri Bazaar and Bapu Bazaar, WhatsApp has rolled out the training program in collaboration with Josh Talks, a social media platform.

At the SMBSaathi Utsav, a team of volunteers trained in the various aspects of online business management is pitching the sessions. The training involves lessons on using the WhatsApp Business App for managing incoming leads, organizing policies, building product/service showcases, and marketing to a specific audience.

Businesses from various sectors such as traditional arts, handicrafts, fashion, apparel, jewelry, food, beverage outlets, and several more are benefiting from the training offered by WhatsApp.

While elaborating on the initiative’s purpose, the head of WhatsApp India, Abhijit Bose, said that the company wishes to unlock the unlimited potential in local small businesses, which have been acting as the backbone of the Indian economy. As an example, he mentioned how WhatsApp Business App helped small businesses to thrive during the pandemic by keeping the owners connected to their customer base.

High-risk warning issued for Google Chrome and Mozilla by government

By

Sahil Pawar

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June 9, 2022

CERT-in High-risk warning for Google Chrome and Mozilla users

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) of the Indian government has flagged several vulnerabilities in Google Chrome and Mozilla products. According to CERT-In, these vulnerabilities gave the hackers access to the users’ sensitive data by allowing them to execute arbitrary codes by bypassing all the security mechanisms in place.

Google Chrome OS versions before 96.0.4664.209 contained vulnerabilities marked as high-risk by CERT-In. Vulnerabilities in this criteria are labeled under CVE-2022-1633, CVE-202-1636, CVE-2021-43527, CVE-2022-1489, CVE-2022-1859, CVE-2022-1867, and CVE-2022-23308 by Google.

In the case of Mozilla, CERT-In has detected and flagged bugs present in the Mozilla Firefox Thunderbird versions before 91.10, Mozilla Firefox iOS versions before 101, Mozilla Firefox versions before 101, and Mozilla Firefox ESR versions before 91.10.

Google acknowledged the bugs and later reported to have fixed them. The company also requested the users to update Chrome OS to the latest version to steer clear of those bugs. Similarly, Mozilla urged its users to download the latest versions, namely Mozilla Firefox iOS 101, Mozilla Firefox Thunderbird version 91.10, Mozilla Firefox ESR version 91.10, and Mozilla Firefox 101 to avoid the vulnerabilities.

According to CERT-In, these vulnerabilities posed a significant threat to the security and privacy of the users by allowing the hackers to start a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The bugs also allowed the hackers to disclose sensitive information, break security restrictions, execute arbitrary codes, and inflict spoofing attacks.

While explaining the vulnerabilities, CERT-In said that the bugs in Chrome OS are due to heap buffer overflow in V8 internalization, sharesheet, performance manager, and performance APIs. CERT-In added that the bugs reported in dev-libs/libxml2, insufficient validation of untrusted input in data transfer, and out of bounds memory access in UI Shelf contributed to the vulnerabilities.

Bud Raises $80M for its AI-Powered Open Banking Platform

By

Disha Chopra

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June 9, 2022

To develop its international client portfolio, Bud, an open banking platform, raised $80M in a Series B funding round. The company is known for its embedded financial services, where various fintech technologies are applied to enhance the offerings.

The idea of establishing an open banking platform was to provide a single point of access for consumers to learn and benefit from the fintech services. Later, the model became a viable B2B model for collaborating with other institutions and larger banks to help them enhance customer engagement.

Over time, several financial institutions across Europe started betting big on open banking payments by citing several tangible benefits for both merchants and customers.

Bud’s CEO and co-founder, Ed Maslaveckas, said, “There’s lots of open banking aggregation players, but there’s very few people that have built good data intelligence, and what we are allowing for is for businesses that work with existing aggregators to use our intelligence services.”

He also highlighted that Bud would use the investment for international expansion and R&D. Specifically, it will cater to building on AI-based tools. Besides the vital area of focus, Bud will also contribute a part of the raised money to enhance categorization, income verification, and merchant recognition.

Such advances in the banking sector have less to do with banks ingesting more data from external sources but more with them being able to access what is sitting in their corner. Bud believes that the conjugation of open banking data and AI capabilities will enable the lending customers to grow their capacity by around 85% in their affordability assessment.